Many smoking devices have been proposed through the years as improvements upon, or alternatives to, smoking products that require combusting tobacco for use. Many of those devices purportedly have been designed to provide the sensations associated with cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoking, but without delivering considerable quantities of incomplete combustion and pyrolysis products that result from the burning of tobacco. To this end, there have been proposed numerous smoking products, flavor generators, and medicinal inhalers that utilize electrical energy to vaporize or heat a volatile material, or attempt to provide the sensations of cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoking without burning tobacco to a significant degree. See, for example, the various alternative smoking articles, aerosol delivery devices and heat generating sources set forth in the background art described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,726,320 to Robinson et al., U.S. Pat. Pub. No. 2013/0255702 to Griffith Jr. et al., U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/536,438 to Sebastian et al., filed Jun. 28, 2012, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/602,871 to Collett et al., filed Sep. 4, 2012, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/647,000 to Sears et al., filed Oct. 8, 2012, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/826,929 to Ampolini et al., filed Mar. 14, 2013, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/011,992 to Davis et al., filed Aug. 28, 2013, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
It would be desirable to provide a smoking article that employs heat produced by electrical energy to provide the sensations of cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoking, that does so without combusting tobacco to any significant degree, that does so without the need of a combustion heat source, and that does so without necessarily delivering considerable quantities of incomplete combustion and pyrolysis products. Further, advances with respect to manufacturing electronic smoking articles would be desirable.